However, after talking to a few different brokers in residential and commercial, I am realizing as important as it is to specialize and focus on a given product type, it is equally important to get some visibility into many different aspects before deciding on a specific specialty.  

Problems arise because some owners don’t want to convert; because some owners can’t qualify for condo loans ( even if they own their co-op apartment free and clear they’d still be responsible for their pro rata share of the underlying cooperative mortgage), and because owners realize that when co-ops are converted to condos the taxing authorities will value the property differently; coops are valued as rental buildings while condos are valued as individual owned units, usually resulting in a 50-100% increase in property taxes.

If you buy a large property (say 100 acres) for $100K, and sell a few small parcels from it totaling 20 acres for $60K overall, do you have to pay any taxes on the sale or would that still be considered non taxable since you haven’t realized a gain over the initial $100K purchase price (even though you still maintain possession of a majority of the land purchased)?

I just realized that wholesaling isn’t for me and I preferred the Agency route.

While listening to the bigger pockets podcast on my drives to and from work, I realized I jumped into real estate investing with not only zero experience but zero personal asset protection. 

I bought into a program to teach me how to get partners to buy larger deals but realized it wasn’t for me.

I realized that if I had kept more reserves and had less leverage and done a rental stress test on my properties, all of the properties I had that I bought at the top of the market in 2006, I would have been doing better right now.

But we quickly realized even that was low if we shopped right.  

As my learning continued I realized the difficulty posed by obtaining a commercial loan; due to the LLC, the interest rate (as opposed to traditional loans), 25% down payment and the high costs associated with the “Condotels”.

I realized I had to expand faster and began scouring the MLS for another deal.